MEXICAN SAYS POLICE MAY BE LINKED TO MASS GRAVES

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican police could be involved in
suspected drug cartel murders which have come to light with the discovery of
at least six corpses buried near the U.S. border, a prosecutor said on
Thursday.

"There is possible involvement of members of security units, both at state
level and federal level," Arturo Gonzalez Rascon, prosecutor for the
northern state of Chihuahua, told reporters.

Speaking outside a ranch near the dusty border city of Ciudad Juarez, where
the remains of six people have been found piled on top of each other, Rascon
said state, municipal and federal authorities were cooperating with the U.S.
FBI in the search for victims of the notorious Juarez cocaine cartel.

Mexican investigators and FBI agents, using methods deployed in Kosovo to
find mass graves, extended their search at the La Campana (the Bell) ranch
on Thursday.

Having already found human remains as well as clothes, belts and shoes near
a barn on the ranch, forensics experts began to survey land toward the back
of the property, using picks and shovels and occasionally a backhoe to
scrape away the arid desert soil.

Originally, Mexican officials had suggested that as many as 100 people
murdered by the Juarez cartel might be found in four locations. On
Wednesday, they were more cautious.

"We have never mentioned how many bodies we are going to find at these sites
because we don't know precisely," Attorney General Jorge Madrazo told
Mexican radio stations.

FBI Presence Spurs Nationalist Ire

The presence of 65 FBI agents leading the probe spurred nationalist ire that
Mexico's sovereignty was being violated.

"This is a very delicate situation for the country. Mexico cannot allow
operations of this size," said independent Sen. Adolfo Aguilar Zinser.

But Eduardo Ibarrola, the deputy attorney general for international affairs,
rejected the criticism, saying bilateral cooperation was needed to fight
cross-border crime.

While the FBI has tried to keep a low profile and stressed the Mexicans were
leading the probe, officials have been forced to acknowledge they have
neither the technology nor the expertise to deal with possible mass graves.

"It's clear the Americans are promoting this investigation," said Victor
Clark, head of a U.S.-Mexican human rights center in the northwestern city
of Tijuana, another Mexican border town in the grip of bloodthirsty drug
gangs.

"Had it been up to the Mexican authorities, this would never have happened."

Families of some 200 people who have disappeared in Juarez in the past four
years say their pleas for investigations were ignored by Mexican authorities
for years.

U.S. lawmakers allege Mexico's powerful drug cartels have used their
billion-dollar proceeds to buy their way so high up into the government
their hitmen and capos do as they please.

Police throughout Mexico are renowned for corruption but in northern border
states, such as Chihuahua, they are widely regarded as totally in the pay of
the drug barons.

"We knew the locations of the ranches, but we couldn't do anything about
it," Phil Jordan, former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's
El Paso Intelligence Center, told the Dallas Morning News.

"You can't turn to Mexico's federal police because they are the ones who
buried some of the people."

On Tuesday, when the digging began, Madrazo said his agency wasinvestigating
around 100 disappearances in the Juarez area --including 22 U.S. citizens.

The search for the cemeteries was launched after a former Mexican policeman
who moonlighted as a cartel hitman told U.S. interrogators scores of bodies
had been hidden on ranches owned by drug lords. He said he had killed 80
people.